A personal blog owned by Zilko, who regularly writes about his life, or anything that comes up to his mind

Daily Archives: July 13, 2017

In June I decided, for fun, to download an app, called MyFitnessPal, to help me track my daily nutritional intake.

For a few months now, I already have an app linked to my gym that records my trainings there. However, it does not record what I consume, while this aspect plays a big role in achieving my goal of living a healthy life. I mean, it is not that I have not watched what I consumed. In fact, I have been doing so since moving to the Netherlands; and I have enjoyed the great benefit of this where I can say that I feel much healthier now than I was, say, 10 years ago. But again, this was not really quantified and I just basically followed my “common sense”, haha 😆 .

One day I burned about 2000 more calories than what I consumed according to the app. This was not a good idea, though 😛 .

Anyway, I find the app so much fun. Overall, it really helps me track how much calories I consume everyday and, more importantly, the nutrition breakdown. The breakdown helps me evaluate my eating habit and puts some food to perspective. For instance, do you know that one half of a small cup of peanuts contains about 400 calories? The calories come mostly from fat, haha. Speaking of fat, this is one aspect I am trying to bring down from my plates. So this app has played a big role in guiding me in the supermarket. Now, I prefer to buy low fat products (lean red meat, chicken breast, etc), and it appears to me that the more fat there is in meat, the cheaper it is! So there is indeed a price to pay when trying to “save” some money in this department. Lol 😆 . You see, not that I was not aware of all of this before, but the app has helped me focus on my healthy life goal.

Obviously the big downside of the app is the rigorous amount of data feeding. Sure, it helps that the app can scan barcode so I do not need to enter the information manually every time I consume new products and it has a rich database with millions of food already pre-recorded in it anyway. What I mean is, I must record every single thing, sometimes down to the ingredient level, every time I cook/eat something. Certainly, this is tedious. So to be honest, I have doubts on my usage of this app in the longer run.

I need to measure every single ingredient that I use.

Having said that, actually I do not need to record the data every single day. What I really need from the app is an overview of how I have been consuming and use the data to make adjustment(s), also guided by the app, if necessary. Therefore, a few days of data would have actually been enough, then some controls here and then.

It has been about two weeks since I used the app. As of now, I am still dilligent enough to use it everyday, haha. Call it an obsession, maybe, but so far I have been happy with my own progress. So let’s see how it goes!! 🙂